Specialized in visual design and in topics such as accessibilityInvolved in new media and alternative communication, he started in the 2002, the collective web audio project a\_RADIO (http://www.aradio.it).

He has founded, togheter with the other components of the team, the web designers collective Klash (http://www.klash.it)

about the book: Online video, Web interfaces, file sharing, mailing lists and social networks are transforming our experience of the world. While the social dimension of these Web-related forms dominates public discourse, their aesthetic impact is largely ignored. In response, Web Aesthetics intervenes in the field of new media studies and art theory, proposing an organic theory of digital media aesthetics.

Italian media theorist Vito Campanelli tracks the proliferation of Web technologies, platforms and software and offers a catalogue of aesthetic strategies to address their profound cultural impact. As Campanelli argues, when the Web is located inside sociocultural practices, processes and expressions, it becomes a powerful agent of aestheticization of life on a global scale.

about the author: Vito Campanelli lectures on the theory and technology of mass communication at the University of Naples-L’Orientale. He is a freelance curator of digital culture events and co-founder of MAO - Media & Arts Office. His essays on media art are regularly published in international journals.

Chapter I - Dialogue Inside and Outside the WebClosed MonadsSpam and Viruses: The Evil to Be EradicatedNew Media Culture

Chapter II - Aesthetic DiffusionA Short History of the Concept of Aesthetic ExperienceDiffuse AestheticsTheory of MemesAby Warburg: The Concept of EngramMeme Gallery

Chapter III - Aesthetic Experience on the WebTo Flow or Not to FlowFictionsOptical and Haptic

Chapter IV - Aesthetic Experience and Digital NetworksTravellers in the Aesthetic MatrixThe DivX and MP3 ExperienceThe Centrality of the EyeDigital Cameras and the Will of TechnologyWhat to Fill Digital Memories With?

GEERT LOVINKDirector of the "Institute of Network Cultures" (Amsterdam)

"Once the Internet changed the world, now the world is changing the Internet"

Lovink, former MAO guest during October 2006, is one of the most important Net theorist, absolute sui generis thinker he is very popular in important universities and, in parallel, a very welcomed theorist of European and international counterculture.Lovink's talk will point out the phenomena of the rise on the Internet of local and regional languages that are bringing up for discussion the egemony of English as official language of a globalizated world.

Soundtoys Remixed, the title of the performance that Mackern will offer to the MADRE audience, will deal with Net surfing and (real-time) remix of 40 of his soundtoys developed between 1997 and 2007.Mackernian visions will flow through the (real-time) projection on three different screens, while the surrounding sounds will hold the audience in a sinesthetic embrace that will shake new reflections about the increasingly more hybrid nature of the reality we face everyday.

SOUNDTOYS / AUDIOVISUAL INTERFACES

“... Just listen to your eyes.”Wim Wenders, Once

Brian Mackern was born in 1962 in Montevideo (Uruguay) and after technical college he started to explore the potentials, mainly sound-related, of the Web. In 1997 he became the director of Artefactos Virtuales #1, one of the first latin-american web spaces about the research and the development of Net Art projects, while in recent years he appeared among the creators of Netart\_latino #2, a database whose aim was of both documenting the work of south-american netartists, and building a link between their various experiences, that risked to remain isolated in a continent that tends to keep its artists attempts “unincorporated” #3.The sense of belonging to a specific culture and the bond with the roots are a key element to the work of Mackern. Central from this point of view is the reinterpretation of the so-called “Tormenta de Santa Rosa”. The worship of Santa Rosa from Lima in the Rio de la Plata area is celebrated in the last days of August, when the place is hit by frequent floods and big rains. These natural phenomena are associated, in the popular belief, to the presence of the Saint, and Mackern provides a personal reading of the cult in his project 34s56w.org #4.

Mackern works have been presented in biennals, festivals and exhibitions at the four corners of the world (Uruguay, Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, Poland, Korea, etc.) and he was also prized with many awards in the above mentioned countries in over 10 years of artistic activity.

Brian Mackern is definitely an artist of the Net generation and his research is to be collocated within the tradition linked to some creative experimentations about the relationship between audio and visual objects (think about the vanguards of 1900), but it is now, in the Web, that it finds its best ground to get - finally - depth and visibility.Thanks to the opportunities introduced by new digital tools, the dialectic tension between sounds and images has become object of endless reflections and investigations, all connected to the process of spreading of new cultural paradigms. Among them - above all - self-consciousness and self-sufficient life of the digital objects.Within this frame, soundtoys is the personal answer of Mackern the artist to his need to find new ways of mediation between sounds and images.Every soundtoy, pure minimal meaning unit, can be remixed to others, paving the way to a complexity that, by perpetually multiplying the combination chances, becomes almost impossible to be seen as finite and leaves to the observer the task to complete the meaning of one among many possible trajectories.

MAO - Media & Arts Office ONLUS is a no profit cultural association that organizes cutural events, editorial contents and initiatives about media art.MAO's interest is present-day art expressed in all the platforms in which it appears: environmental installations that apply new technologies, live audio and visuals produced by creatives from all over the world, talks and lectures on the most actual topics we are involved in as technology users and new communication platforms.To know more about MAO and its activities:www.mediartsoffice.eu

The physical spaces of Galleria Overfoto, together with the virtual ones of Second Life, host the exibition called Shooting Pixels, pictures collection by Marco Cadioli, Antonello Segretario and Marco Zagaria, about the places, anything but material, but still “real”, of cyberspace and its inhabitants.If it is true that the Web is an alternative reality, a vital space, always changing, in which we spend increasingly more time - and the Second Life phnomenon is the clearest proof of it - Web photography gets the same importance of direct imprint and evidence of something that “has been”, as traditional photography.So the landscape becomes the red line that links the works of the three artists: landscape in a straight sense, as for the installation of Antonello Segretario (a full-wall view of a green Second Life “island”, including a real lawn extention), but even in a “human” sense, as for the two hyperrealistic portraits by Marco Zagaria, or in both senses, as for the desert black and white landcapes, alterned with images from the virtual wars front and avatar portraits by Marco Cadioli.All of this, enriched with a recall to the “real reality”, in a dialectic game of inside and “inside-other”, which finds its natural expression in an exposition that involves at the same time the tangible spaces of the Gallery and the simulated ones of Second Life.MAO - Media & Arts Office ONLU is partner of the event.

Opening: saturday, 15th december 2007, 7:00 - 11:00 pm.

Galleria Overfoto - Vico San Pietro a Majella 6 - 80138 Napoli (piazza Bellini) and live on Second Life

:: Marco Zagaria (www.marcozagaria.it): born in 1969 in Naples, where he lives and works. His first artistic experiences mainly involve painting, getting to the use of manipulated digital photography which fully expresses his desire to interpret and measure reality as a figurative fiction. He took part to several collections in Italy and abroad, among which the XIV Quadriennale at the Palazzo Reale in Naples in 2003.

Vito Campanelli and Danilo Capasso are working to a new book. They are approaching aesthetic and cultural implications of digital culture, towards 5 questions suggested by the new media theoric Lev Manovich.Your answers (the most interesting), will be published on the book, so if you are interested please submit your answers (you can also answer to just one question) and a small bio.